Sunday, September 30, 2007

Corn Ethanol: The Great Boondoggle

The auto fuel known as corn-ethanol has been getting lot of press lately so it seemed like a good time as any to open up the main site's ethanol page for comments. The above pic is an abscessed liver of a cow. Their natural diet is supposed to be grass (cellulose). Corn animal feed, a byproduct of the government subsidized corn-ethanol industry, is mostly ground up corn cobs and is high in starch. The cows liver can't handle high levels of the unnatural diet so farmers will often have to use lots of antibiotics just to keep the cows alive. The result is a much lower quality beef than what comes from grass fed cows. When it comes to carbon dioxide and even energy economics many claim ethanol is a loser as well. To understand why the Nobel Laureate Steven Chu says "it would be better if we just burnt oil" please make the jump to our main website.

Saturday, September 29, 2007

Kidnapped!!!!!!Ms. Sparrow recently forced Mr. Sparrow to take a trip to northern California. There was supposed to be access to the world wide web. Unfortunately Ms. Sparrow meant business when she said "vacation" and Mr. Sparrow could barely even check his email. Apparently Mrs. Rabett, the wife of the beloved long eared professor Eli Rabett, is much kinder than Ms. Sparrow. Internet withdrawal can be a shockingly large pain in the arse. However, lots of wine did ease the pain. If you get a chance I highly recommend Gundlach Bundschu and Loxton. Their red zins and ports are hard to let go. Also, if you are into waterfalls make sure you visit Yosemite in May and not September.

Mr. Sparrow is alive and well and will be blogging and documenting the schism between science and politics within the next 24 hours.

Friday, September 21, 2007

The findings suggest that, far from being temporary, high energy prices are likely for decades to come. "It is a hard truth that the global supply of oil and natural gas from the conventional sources relied upon historically is unlikely to meet projected 50% to 60% growth in demand over the next 25 years," says the draft report, titled "Facing the Hard Truths About Energy."

"In geoeconomic terms, the biggest impact will come from increasing demand for oil and natural gas from developing countries," said the draft report, a copy of which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. "This demand may outpace timely development of new supply sources, thereby pressuring prices to rise."

The study, which was requested by U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman in October 2005, was conducted by the National Petroleum Council, an industry group that advises the secretary.

That's not exactly the kind of headline you want to read when crude oil is already at $73 a barrel. When things are this bad -- crude prices are up 12% in the past two months as of July 12 -- you don't want to hear that they're going to get worse.

Yet that's exactly what consumers -- and investors -- should expect, the International Energy Agency said in its latest Medium-Term Oil Market Report, issued July 9. The market for oil will get even tighter over the next five years. (And in case you're looking for a way out, natural-gas markets may be even tighter.)

In the IEA's July 2007 Medium-Term Oil Market Report (available via the WSJ), they reach the conclusion of Peak Lite:

Despite four years of high oil prices, this report sees increasing market tightness beyond 2010, with OPEC spare capacity declining to minimal levels by 2012. A stronger demand outlook, together with project slippage and geopolitical problems has led to downward revisions of OPEC spare capacity by 2 mb/d in 2009. Despite an increase in biofuels production and a bunching of supply projects over the next few years, OPEC spare capacity is expected to remain relatively constrained before 2009 when slowing upstream capacity growth and accelerating non-OECD demand once more pull it down to uncomfortably low levels.

Now the former chairman of Shell has come out with harsh words of his own:

Lord Oxburgh, the former chairman of Shell, has issued a stark warning that the price of oil could hit $150 per barrel, with oil production peaking within the next 20 years.

He accused the industry of having its head "in the sand" about the depletion of supplies, and warned: "We may be sleepwalking into a problem which is actually going to be very serious and it may be too late to do anything about it by the time we are fully aware."

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Over at our sister site we've listed some very strong evidence that heat islands do not impact NASA's surface temperature records. Some of the evidence includes two independent satellite system that show the same temperature trend as the surface stations

and the observation that most of the warming is occurring at the north pole (far away from major cities).

One would think that obvious conclusion is that global warming is real and is not a set of false readings caused by urban heat islands.

Despite this, climate change critics (the word critic does not distinguish between denier and skeptic) Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre have been harshly criticizing the surface record. They've been on a nation wide effort to photograph and critique every surface station in the US. Out of 1,221 surface stations they've already photographed and cataloged 33.09% of them. The stations have been ranked anywhere from class 1 (best) to class 5 which are described as:

As you can see from the picture above NASA's temperature trend (black) matches closely with both the best (red) and the worst (green) temperature stations. It would appear that even the most "contaminated" stations the climate critics use to refute global warming (whether or not they are actually part of NASA's temperature record) do a surprisingly decent job of reporting temperature trends. Clearly the surface stations are tough little instruments. It is also wise to notice that the best (red) stations match NASA's readings (black) with very high precision.

So I decided to create ToughStations.org to see just how tough these stations are. ToughStations.org will be posting pictures of the class 5 surface stations, their USHCN identification number, GHCN identification number and the surfacestations.org official critique/description. Each picture will also come with a link to surfacestations.org so you can see all of the pictures relevant to that station. ToughStations.org will post 10 stations at a time until the original 58 class 5's are all posted. Remember, these are the worst of the worst. Since NASA uses satellite photos to remove stations that are near bright lights I will try and figure out which of these stations (if any) are a part of NASA's official temperature record.

Friday, September 14, 2007

Global Warming Consensus Disproved Again:Denial Study Part III

There is an obvious scientific consensus on climate change that supports the IPCC. Thanks to propaganda tactics outlined in Frank Luntz's famous memo there has been a massive effort by vested industrial and political interests in hopes of falsely convincing the public that no such consensus exists.

Round I: Benny Peiser

First there was Benny Peiser who claimed he found 34 abstracts out of 1,247 peer-review journals/abstracts that disagreed with the consensus. One of Peisers most obvious errors was including a paper that promoted carbon sequestration and alternative energy through micro-algae biodiesel as one of his 34 'consensus busting' papers. It took him two years to admit he was 97% wrong.

Round II: An Illegitimate Journal

Then there was a survey published in a very small journal edited by none other than Benny Peiser that also rejected the consensus. This journal is not listed in the ISI index's master list of 14,450 peer review journals. A journal that does not make this list is in all probability not a legitimate journal. The surveys credibility was strongly attacked by manyscientists that do have publications in top journals.

Round III: A Study of Misrepresentation

Now there is a study produced by the Exxon Mobil funded Hudson Institute. WorldNetDaily is touting this as proof that "500 scientists refute global warming dangers". So I downloaded the PDF of the study and took a quick scan of who these 500 scientists were. A few familiar names popped up. The first of which is the weather channels Heidi Cullen from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO). She is listed as publishing skeptical material which is kind of peculiar since she made newspaper headlines for chastising skeptics on her blog:

“If a meteorologist has an American Meteorological Society Seal of Approval which is used to confer legitimacy to TV meteorologists, then meteorologists have a responsibility to truly educate themselves on the science of global warming . . . . If a meteorologist can’t speak to the fundamental science of climate change, then maybe the AMS shouldn’t give them a Seal of Approval. Clearly, the AMS doesn’t agree that global warming can be blamed on cyclical weather patterns. It’s like allowing a meteorologist to go on-air and say that hurricanes rotate clockwise . . . It’s not a political statement . . . it’s just an incorrect statement.”

Obviously there are some pretty major flaws with the Hudson's consensus debunking study. Despite this, I kept on scanning the document. Apparently almost half of the contributors to realclimate.org are skeptics:

The List of More Than 500 Scientists Documenting Doubts of Man-Made Global Warming Scares****Citation of the work of the following scientists does not imply that they necessarily support our conclusions.

At this point I'm literally left speechless. This report is claiming that some of the ardent supporters of the consensus on climate change are publishing consensus debunking work. This is a blatant attempt to confuse and take advantage of the layman with highly technical gobbledy-gook. The fact that something this ridiculous has the name of one of Ronald Reagan's advisers on it makes it all the more bizarre.

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

NYT's Trumpets Bjørn Lomborg

A little background first. Bjørn Lomborg wrote an extremely controversial book called The Skeptical Environmentalist. This book launched a firestorm of controversy with the vast majority of mainstream scientists criticizing Lomborg. An editorial in the prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature described Lomborgs work as 'employs the strategy of those who argue that... Jews weren't singled out by the Nazis'. And National Academy of Science member Norman Myers said Lomborg had not done "a fraction of the homework that could give him a preliminary understanding of the science in question." Scientific American has a 12 page article titled "Misleading Math about the Earth" dedicated solely to debunking his book. Clearly Bjørn Lomborg is not a mainstream scientist. Recently the New York Times had two pieces on him. How did the NYT's author John Tierney science columnist and blogger describe him?

Dr. Lomborg believes in global warming but isn’t a zealot — he doesn’t refer to scientists who question the climate models as “denialists,” as if there were some revealed dogma about future climate. [snip] The lesson from our expedition is not that global warming is a trivial problem. Although Dr. Lomborg believes its dangers have been hyped...

In both of NYT's pieces on Lomborg a book is mentioned. The title:

Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming

That name has been used before. A quick look at Amazon shows that it's first review is none other than climate change critic and fiction author Michael Crichton. He of course gives the book a glowing review. However, the Washington Post's editorial review is in stark contrast of Crichton:

In one case after another, Lomborg asserts, it's cheaper and better to do nothing immediately to combat climate change, but instead to invest in other things.

The deepest flaw in Cool It is its failure to take into account the full range of future climate possibilities. The computer models project outcomes ranging from mild, which he acknowledges, to truly catastrophic, which he ignores. While the chances of catastrophic climate change may still be small, they are increasing: By comparing real world data with the 2001 IPCC projections, researchers have shown that the sea is rising more swiftly than even the worst case scenarios in the projections.

Lomborg's mantra is the supposedly high costs of dealing with climate change. The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change is a detailed analysis of those costs, commissioned by the UK Treasury and reported to the prime minister. Stern, a senior government economist, argues that it's much cheaper to combat climate change than to live with the consequences.

It would appear that the NYT's needs a new science columnist. If there is one thing that the NYT's columnist is good at is realizing what he his. This is from John Tierney's bio:

John Tierney always wanted to be a scientist but went into journalism because its peer-review process was a great deal easier to sneak through.

That certainly seems to describe this situation rather nicely. In full disclosure this post does not intend to criticize Lomborg's solutions. This post is merely pointing out that the logic and supporting statistics used by Lomborg is clearly in conflict with statements given by numerous leading scientists and institutions. The NYT's columnist did not do an adequate job of informing their readers just how controversial Lomborg is.

Update: In the "Further Reading" box of links one, and only one, article Lomborg is cited. This article is also devoid of harsh statements made by Lomborg.

Update II:The WSJ editorial board member Kimberly Strassel reviews his book in a similar manner:

On the other side are those who don't think that the Earth is warming; and even if it is, they don't think that man is causing it; and even if man is to blame, it isn't clear that global warming is bad; and even if it is, efforts to fix it will cost too much and may, in the end, do more harm than good. Standing in the practical middle is Bjorn Lomborg, the free-thinking Dane who, in "The Skeptical Environmentalist" (2001), challenged the belief that the environment is going to pieces.

Let it be known that the editorial board of the WSJ has avoided invitations from Scientific American to have a simple sit down with the worlds top scientists and learn the material.

Monday, September 10, 2007

Gigawatt Lasers From Space:Guaranteeing you a tan in 0.00000000000000001 seconds.

Google isn't picking much of anything up yet but apparently the Japanese space agency (JAXA) and Osaka University are launching test versions of a satellite that will convert energy in space into microwaves and then transmit them down to earth. Apparently they've made dramatic improvements in the technology and if all goes well they hope to build a 1,000,000,000 watt laser to transmit energy from space to ground station collectors. Since the laser is expected to be 22,400 miles up lets hope that the Japanese are good shots. Fully operational versions are expected to arrive in the year 2030. I'd love to see some cost projections. At a few thousand dollars per kilogram, launching stuff up into space isn't cheap.

Sunday, September 09, 2007

NASA Releases Their Code:Skeptics Are Still Upset

NASA has always been reluctant to release it's computer code. The reasoning behind this is as follows:

We publish hundreds of papers a year from GISS alone. We have more data, code and model output online than any comparable institution, we have a number of public scientists who comment on the science and the problems to most people and institutions who care to ask. And yet, the demand is always for more transparency. This is not a demand that will ever be satisfied since there will always be more done by the scientists than ever makes it into papers or products. My comments above stand - independent replication from published descriptions - the algorithms in English, rather than code - are more valuable to everyone concerned than dumps of impenetrable and undocumented code. - gavin

The English version of the code has always been available in what gavin calls "excruciating detail" in the relevant papers. After the miscommunication between NOAA and NASA about the content of NOAA's changing real time data streams the pressure from to release temperature code has changed NASA's tune. It is now available online here:

Hansen also produced a public statement detailing the release in which Hansen made the following comment:

Because the programs include a variety of languages and computer unique functions, Reto would have preferred to have a week or two to combine these into a simpler more transparent structure, but because of a recent flood of demands for the programs, they are being made available as is. People interested in science maywant to wait a week or two for a simplified version.

And if you either read Gavin's previous comment or have done any programing yourself you would know that reading undocumented computer code can be extremely difficult. And in the comments of the skeptic site ClimateAudit.org we have the following comment:

As a general rule I’m not fond of heavily documented code because it introduces an additional point of failure. As code is edited, it begins to no longer resemble the comments unless the extra work to maintain the comments is done as well. And in my experience, this is almost never done. So I’d tend to cut Hansen some slack here on the source code.

Which defends NASA's practice of undocumented code. Despite getting what he wanted McIntyre is not happy:

In my first post on the matter, I suggested that Hansen’s most appropriate response was to make his code available promptly and cordially. Since a somewhat embarrassing error had already been identified, I thought that it would be difficult for NASA to completely stonewall the matter regardless of Hansen’s own wishes in the matter. [snip] Had Hansen done so, if he wished, he could then have included an expression of confidence that the rest of the code did not include material defects. Now he’s had to disclose the code anyway and has done so in a rather graceless way.

And he is apparently digging through reams of red tape to see what he can throw at Hansen:

NASA has very specific standards applicable to software described here . [snip] As I understand it, GISS is part of the Goddard Space Flight Center and is subject to these guidelines. It looks like they apply even to Hansen

Now I personally agree with McIntyre that the code should have been released right away even if it was so unreadable it would have been useless. However, given that GISS research science is operating on a "going-out-of-business budget" I'm starting to wonder if all of this ruckus is just a tactic to prevent any meaningful research from being done. Those standards are for billion dollar rockets and not scientific experiments that can be independently verified by other research teams like the CRU. Hansen has barely enough money to support a skeleton staff and to make sure his lawns are mowed yet McIntyre expects him to jump through more and more hoops? The code is released, the papers were always public and the data is public yet McIntyre wants more blood.... I'd love to know how much sleep Hansen gets.

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

MiT on Doors and EfficiencyMiT has a new sustainability wiki with page analyzing doors. Apparently the average heat transfer per swing door passage is 78 Wh (267 BTU) which is the equivalent of:

1.3 hours of light from a desk lamp

4.3 hours of light from a compact fluorescent bulb

Driving a car 306 feet

Half a mile jog

And apparently using a revolving door is much more efficient:

On average 8x as much air is exhanged when a swing door is opened as opposed to a revolving door. That's 8x as much new air that needs to be heated or cooled and that's why using the revolving door is a great way to reduce energy requirements on campus. {snip} Our estimates show that if everyone used the revolving doors at E25 alone, MIT would save almost $7500 in natural gas amounting to nearly 15 tons of CO2. And that’s just from two of the 29 revolving doors on campus!

Monday, September 03, 2007

Fake News by Fox News & Washington Times Editorial Board

Not too long ago we reported how conservative blogs and even a NYT's editorial had horribly misleading or even blatantly false statements that would have readers believe 1934 was the warmest year on earth. Well Media Matters caught Fox News making distortions as well:

Transcript:

ANGLE: The man behind the website climateaudit.org has forced NASA to admit it was wrong when it said that 1998 was the hottest year on record. Steve McIntyre had to reverse-engineer NASA's figures because the agency refused to give him the formula it used to make the claim. And McIntyre found out NASA had made a serious mistake. NASA eventually agreed and now says 1934 was the hottest year, followed by 1998, then 1921. In fact, five of the hottest 10 years on record occurred before World War II.

Nowhere do they mention the difference between global and US averages. As for NASA refusing to release the forumalas well that's false as well. The algorithms, issues and choices are outlined in excruciating detail in the relevant papers. To Fox's credit their website does carry an article by a journalist from The Times that correctly reports what went on and even provides a link to the memo (pdf format) written by NASA's head climate honcho James Hansen.

Washington Times

Also, it looks like the Washington Post Op-eds has joined the misinformation foray:

But last week, it emerged that NASA had quietly restated its numbers, without fanfare or so much as a press release, after a blogger pointed out faulty methodology. Now, per NASA: 1934 is hottest, followed by 1998, 1921, 2006 and 1931.

So what does NASA's current temperature graph look like? Well here you go:

Or go to NASA direct. Just make sure you look at the GLOBAL temperature graphs. It's pretty obvious that 1934 is not the warmest year on global record. I'm sure the readers would appreciate how so many news outlets left that little factoid out. The op-ed then makes an assault on other news outlets as well as the science itself:

Only one thing is certain: The political debate over global warming has rushed far ahead of the science. [snip]The media coverage amid this confusion has been execrable. Last week's Newsweek purports to take readers inside the world of "Global-Warming Deniers: A Well-Funded Machine" without mentioning that the global-warming alarmists are even better funded, in some cases with government support. Naturally, Newsweek is not very interested in the recent data restatement.

For a more detailed and correct analysis of what actually went on please read my previous post on the subject. One might think the entire editorial board of the Washington Times would not make such a grievous error. All it takes it sending one single email off to NASA or reading realclimate.org.

The boys over at the oildrum recently reported on a new website called WalkScore. It basically finds all of the restaurants, bars, movie theaters, parks, bookstores, coffeshops, etc near you and then calculates their distance from your home address. It's a good tool to use if you want to find a neighborhood to move to or even find stores near you (wherever you are) that you didn't know existed. I'm sure I will be using this a lot whenever I travel. Heck this might even be a good aid in choosing a location for a business.

Recently the Times Online reported that walking produces more CO2 than driving. The problem with their study is that they calculated the emissions of the entire life cycle of beef production (which happens to use 6 barrels of oil per cow) while ignoring the life cycle costs of automobile maintenance and construction. They also assume that everyone eats a pure meat diet and walks as far as they drive. There are many other flaws in this argument highlighted at TreeHugger. The Times Online study does indirectly illustrate a critically important point though.

Conservation seems to the hip thing in Hollywood and nothing illustrates that better than Sheryl Crows recommendation of one square of toilet paper per restroom visit. Conservation is also the main focus of many liberal politicians like Al Gore. Unfortunately while conservation and efficiency will play an important role it will never be able to solve the problem of climate change. According to Chevron conservation won't even solve our supply problem:

Efficiency, improvements, and conservation are part of the solution, but will not, in themselves, meet the need for more energy.

Again, I'm not belittling conservation efforts. Conservation will play a key role but it is simply not the 800 lb gorilla that will change society and "save the environment". Something much more revolutionary in science and politics will have to take place. I will back this statement up with hard data in future posts.

LESS THAN HALF OF ALL PUBLISHED SCIENTISTS ENDORSE GLOBAL WARMING THEORY; COMPREHENSIVE SURVEY OF PUBLISHED CLIMATE RESEARCH REVEALS CHANGING VIEWPOINTS

In order for this to be true this massive list of sourced and web-linked quotes from scientists, 21 National Academies and pretty much every major scientific organization would have to be wrong. So let look at this study a little closer:

The results have been submitted to the journal Energy and Environment

They also claim that the IPCC is unreliable but their literature review is far more reliable:

But does the IPCC represent a consensus view of world scientists? Despite media claims of "thousands of scientists" involved in the report, the actual text is written by a much smaller number of "lead authors." By contrast, the ISI Web of Science database covers 8,700 journals and publications, including every leading scientific journal in the world.

Well after checking Sourcewatch.org it seems that the journal's editor is Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen who happens to be a climate skeptic. It would also appear that Energy and Environment is not included in Journal Citation Reports, which lists the impact factors (science speak for how frequently something is referenced/used/cited) for the top 6000 peer-reviewed journals. Ontop of this the journal does not appear on the ISI index's master list of 14,450 peer review journals. The American Chemical Society, a very large and very influential scientific society, published an article harshly criticizingEnergy and the Environments credibility.

A while back a social anthropologist named Benny Peiser (who specializes in "contemporary thought and societal evolution") reviewed climate change abstracts and claimed he found 34 that disagreed with the consensus. One of the abstracts discussed the need for alternative energy and carbon sequestration. Amazingly Benny thought that debunked the consensus. After 2 years later Benny finally admitted that he was 97% wrong. Interestingly enough, Benny is also an editor of Energy and Environment. Will this be a repeat? Given that the all of academies of the G8 countries endorsed the IPCC recently it is highly unlikely that there has been such a massive paradigm shift. Will report more when I get my hand on the unpublished paper.

ENDORSED/SOURCED BY!

About Logical Science

The mission of Logical Science is to defend mainstream science. We will do this by exposing how poorly it is portrayed by the mass media and documenting the war on science that industrial and special interest groups have been waging to promote their ideology. Another defensive strategy is to discuss supporting evidence and technologies that will help people adapt. To avoid being a monomaniac some scientific "fun stuff" will be added to spice up the blog. I'm a computational biologist that believes anyone with a high school degree, an open mind and a little time on their hands can understand the science and see just how bad the misinformation is. If I am doing my job correctly, you don't have to believe me, because you can always check the references. I don't want people to have to believe me, because that's not what science is about. You should look at the facts and draw your own conclusions.